REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES (2 page)

He took the gaffer tape and carefully bound her ankles to the
chair legs and her wrists to the upright of the chair-back so that
she couldn’t escape when she woke up. He had plenty of gaffer tape
left over so he decided that it would be a good idea to use it all
up. He continued wrapping the tape around her calves and forearms,
pinning her limbs to the chair in a vice-like grip. Then he tore
off the last strip of tape and covered her mouth with
it.

Simon stepped back and admired his handiwork. He’d done a very
professional job - Hannah wasn’t going anywhere. He went back into
the kitchen and returned, dragging another kitchen chair behind
him. He pulled it past his unconscious mother and placed it in
front of her, at a distance of about three feet. Spinning the chair
round to face his mother, he sat down, toying with the carving
knife. On TV, Leslie Crowther was telling a losing contestant that
she had won a Crackerjack pencil. The responding roar of
‘Crackerjack’ interrupted Simon’s concentration for a couple of
seconds as he felt a compulsion to join in. He couldn’t stop
himself. Pavlov would have been proud of him.

“Crackerjack!”

His shout didn’t wake up his mother but a few minutes later
Hannah regained consciousness and found her movements severely
restricted. She moved her head downwards to see that she was tied
to a chair. Who had done this to her? Her eyes darted around the
room looking for signs of an intruder but all she could see was her
ten year old son sitting opposite her, silently studying her.
Surely Simon couldn’t have done this? But there was nobody else
around. She felt decidedly unsettled at how remarkably composed and
unfazed her son seemed to be.

Simon looked his mother up and down, took a deep breath, and
spoke.

“Hi Mum.”

Hi Mum? His mother was secured by gaffer tape and all he could
come up with was ‘hi Mum’?

Simon pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. They
had an annoying habit of slipping.

“I imagine you’re wondering what’s happening to you, Hannah.
Well, this is when you pay for your sins. You’ve wronged me,
wronged me very greatly indeed.”

Hannah was confused. Simon had never called her by her first
name before. Of course he knew her real name, but she was his mum
and he always referred to her as such. She’d always done her best
for Simon, she’d made sure that he never went without, no matter
how tight money became. She knew that he wasn’t overjoyed with the
jeans that she had bought him, but she couldn’t afford the fancy
brands like Levi or Wrangler. What complaints could a ten year old
boy have that would make him do something like this?

“Think back to before you were born, Hannah. In fact think
back to long before you were born, think back to about 150 years
ago. Not so easy for you, is it? But I remember it as if it were
yesterday. You see, we knew each other in a past life, Hannah. You
were Joseph Grimes, an overseer on a cotton plantation in
Louisiana; a hard and unfair taskmaster and way too fond of the
booze. You were a drunken bully”

Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What had got
into her sweet, loving son? He’d gone crazy. Was he possessed or
something? How could he know about her previous lives? After all,
she had no memories of any. He’d obviously gone insane.
Reincarnation was just a myth. Simon continued.

“My name was Ruth and I was
a slave on the plantation. I was a good worker. I always brought in
my quota of cotton. Hell, I often surpassed my quota. Of course my
conditions weren’t that great – I was a slave, but I did have a
family. A family that I loved with all my heart. I had a wonderful
husband and a beautiful little daughter. One night, a few months
after my husband had fallen ill with a fever and passed away, you
came to my hut and battered on the door, demanding to be let in. I
was frightened and hid behind my daughter`s bed, huddled
together with her, hoping that you`d get bored and go away.
But then I heard an almighty crash – loud enough to awaken my poor
dead husband – and saw you stumbling into the house, saliva
dribbling down onto your chin, the door barely hanging on its
hinges. You were stinking drunk.” 

Hannah wanted this nightmare
to be over, but she was in no position to do anything about it. She
wanted to shout at him, to beg him to let her go, to promise that
they’d find someone to help rid him of this dreadful sickness or
whatever it was that was affecting his mind. But the tape over her
mouth was stuck fast. She was powerless to do or say
anything.

“I stayed as quiet as I
could, quiet as a mouse, pulling my daughter behind me to protect
her, but you spotted us and hauled the bed away from us. The
door was broken but you weren’t afraid of anyone seeing you;
after all, you were the overseer – you were untouchable. I shouted
and pleaded with you to get out, to leave us alone, I begged
you to let my daughter leave, whilst you did whatever
you wanted to do to me. But you blocked the doorway with the
wardrobe.

“You just grinned that
sickly, disgusting grin of yours, dragged me to my feet, and then
punched me full in the face. I crumpled to the floor. You
unbuckled your belt, allowing your trousers to drop to the
floor and, despite all the whiskey that you had drunk, you managed
to get a hard on – the pleasure of the pain you were inflicting or
were about to inflict on me overpowering the effects of the
liquor that you had thrown down your throat. 

“I called to my child to
hide in another room but you told her that if she did so
you would kill us both. I told her to close her eyes and cover
her ears but you repeated the same threat. And then... and then you
climbed on top of me, clawing at my dress and undergarments
with your fat stubby fingers, ripping them off and exposing my
womanhood. You raped me, you bastard. You raped me in front of
my little girl. And that’s why you must die. That’s why you must
die. Not because you raped me – I could have lived with that - but
because you raped me in front of my six year old
daughter, destroying her innocence in one fell swoop – you
sick fuck” 

Simon stopped fidgeting with
the knife and grasped its hilt.

“What goes around, comes
around, Grimes!”

Simon stood up and drove the
blade deep into his mother’s abdomen. He twisted the knife and
drew it free, blood dripping off its blade. Hannah grimaced with
the sudden pain. Again, he drove the knife home, this time
just below the ribcage. A third lunge buried the blade in Hannah’s
abdomen, and the fourth and final attack was a slicing motion
that opened Hannah’s throat, leaving a gaping wound, dripping
crimson, as if a macabre smile had been painted onto her
neck 

Simon let the knife fall to
the floor and went upstairs to his bedroom. He opened a drawer
and searched for a clean pair of Y-fronts. He casually changed
into the clean underwear, putting his used underpants into the
laundry basket on the upstairs landing just as he would have
done on any other day, even though there was no one to wash them
now. He put his jeans back on, tucking his shirt into his jeans
before refastening the blue and red snake belt and walking over to
his train set, where he picked up the Princess Victoria locomotive
and put it into his pocket.

He left the bedroom, not
bothering to close the door, and stopped at the top of the stairs.
He paused for a couple of seconds and then lifted his leg over the
bannister and slid down to the bottom of the stairs. Dismounting
from the bannister he looked towards the upstairs landing. He
smiled and spoke aloud to himself.

“Why not? Who’s going to
stop me?”

He jogged back upstairs and
climbed back onto the bannister. He slid down again, this time
letting out a ‘whoop’ as if he were a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
He dismounted the bannister and turned towards the front
door.

He opened the door and
stepped outside. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, it being
Christmas Eve, but the house was situated on a main road and
he knew that there would still be some cars, trucks, and
buses passing his house. Not everyone was at home with their
families yet. He took a few paces forward and stood by the kerb,
looking to his right, watching the oncoming vehicles. A grey Ford
Anglia and a black Austin Morris 1100 drove past. Simon was very
good at recognizing cars thanks to the Observers book of
Automobiles that his father had given him last Christmas. He also
had an Observers book of birds, but it was much easier to car-watch
than bird-watch. Especially when you lived on a main road. A
light-blue Triumph Herald convertible approached with its roof
down. The couple inside must have been crazy; Simon could feel the
cold evening air trying to cut through him. He tried in vain to
blow smoke rings from his breath as it left his mouth, just like
his dad had been able to do when smoking a cigarette. He heard a
louder engine. That was more like it. This was almost certainly a
lorry. He took a better look and could see that the headlights were
set too high and too far apart to be those of a car. As the vehicle
got closer he could make out the shape of a dumper-truck. He
sang quietly to himself.

“The Milky Bar Kid is strong
and tough,

And only the best is good
enough,

The creamiest
milk,

The whitest bar,

The good taste that’s in
Milky Bar.”

He made a few silent
calculations and then, at the perfect moment, he shouted as
loud as he could

“THE MILKY BARS ARE ON
ME!”

The impact was inevitable as
Simon walked calmly into the path of the diesel-powered monster.
His head smashed against the front of the vehicle before being
forced to follow his body as it was dragged underneath the truck,
the weight of the nearside wheels crushing his small form as they
passed over him. The driver braked hard, pulling back on the
steering wheel as if that would somehow help the vehicle to stop
and avoid what had just happened. After what seemed an eternity the
truck skidded to a halt and stood there, motionless, apparently
untouched except for some blood that was dripping down over the sky
blue bonnet and a small portion of Simon’s scalp that had become
lodged in a space between the bumper and the cab of the
vehicle.

Almost twenty five years had
passed since the unexplained deaths of Hannah Jones and her son
Simon had hit the national news headlines. Psychologists were
interviewed at the time to try to discover the reasons why a young
boy might have murdered his own mother, especially in such a
barbaric way. There were a lot of theories. Perhaps Hannah was
abusing the boy and he suddenly cracked, killing her to stop his
own suffering. But the manner of the murder seemed far too
premeditated for it to have been a sudden emotional response.
Perhaps the boy was on drugs – but that would have shown up during
the post-mortem. And how would the boy have obtained drugs? He was
only ten years old. Perhaps Simon was possessed by the Devil – only
the very religious subscribed to that particular theory. The only
thing for certain was that nobody was certain.

Seated on a bench halfway
between Clarence Pier and the D-Day museum on Southsea seafront,
Aaron Hunt watched as the Isle of Wight ferry made its way across
the Solent to Cowes. It was a clear day and he could easily see the
passenger hovercraft as it started its journey in the opposite
direction. When it arrived in Southsea it would park noisily
alongside Clarence Pier but at this distance its engine couldn’t be
heard. Two minutes earlier he had watched a P&O cross-channel
ferry pass in front of him and enter Portsmouth harbour. He opened
his briefcase and took out his sandwich box. The contents were
never a surprise – he was a single man and had to make his own
packed lunch. If he had wanted to surprise himself he could have
perhaps made three days’ worth of sandwiches, wrapped them in
tinfoil and then shuffled them. But Aaron was a very methodical
man; he was a scientist. Some people may have thought him
particularly strange, not because he was a very methodical man in
all areas, but because of his field of research. Aaron Hunt was one
of the most senior researchers in the field of reincarnation. He
had had a fascination with the subject for as long as he could
remember. He didn’t believe that when we die that’s it – we cease
to exist totally and completely, but he certainly didn’t believe in
the premise of Heaven. Nor Hell for that matter. The only possible
explanation that held any credence with him was that our souls, our
life energy, continue on in another body. But he never forgot that
he was a scientist either. This was but a theory and he needed
undeniable facts, he needed proof, and he would not rest until he
had it.

It was a beautiful sunny day
and it seemed to make his tuna spread sandwiches taste even better.
In his lunchbox, waiting to be eaten, were an apple, a banana, and
a pot of natural yoghurt, along with a metal teaspoon – he wouldn’t
use a plastic spoon on the grounds that he didn’t want to clutter
the environment with litter unnecessarily.

A slightly overweight man,
probably in his mid-twenties, with a shock of red hair and dressed
in jeans and a dark brown bomber jacket over a white T-shirt, sat
down on the bench beside him. He had a couple of day’s beard growth
and his teeth looked like they hadn’t seen a toothbrush for a week.
The briefcase he was carrying looked a little out of place bearing
in mind how casually he was dressed.